Another business idea

[John Barton]

I am sure that this has been brought up before but another thing you can do with your lasers is to make stamps and embossing plates for leather workers.

We do leather cue cases and lately we have been playing with embossing plates.

This is the result,

[Michael Hunter]

Nice idea, but what do you make the stamps/plates from?
I had always assumed that marking leather was done with a hot stamp.

[Steve Clarkson]

Yea John.......how the heck did you do that? Marking leather like that would be huge!

[Dan Hintz]

Yea John.......how the heck did you do that? Marking leather like that would be huge!
Think you might spin up your Gucci or Prada bag business again, Steve? :p

[Mike Null]

Steve

When you buy rawhide from somebody like Tandy, you can wet it and press any design you want into it. I remember making a belt using the various tools that are used much like a punch to press the designs in the leather.

I imagine the Tandy website has a "how to" section.

[Rodne Gold]

You can make hot stamping dies with the laser - you just use the silicon stamping die material , just the same as making a rubber stamp.
This type of stuff
http://www.rubberstampmaterials.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=166

the Die right at the bottom , orange one is one of them

[Steve Clarkson]

At a few hundred dollars a bag? Sure!!!!

[Steve Clarkson]

I thought the rubber stamps we make could only be used with ink.......guess you learn something new everyday! I'll check out Tandy to see what they have. Thanks!

[John Barton]

We use a hard plastic or resin sheet to make the plates. We also have a clicker die press to impress the leather. I will post a picture of it tomorrow.

You can use phenolic rod to make the small stamps and also what are called maker's marks, identification stamps that leather workers put on their work.

I don't know the exact composition of the plastic in English (or in Chinese) we just went across the street to the supplier and picked out a bunch of sheets from what he had and tried them all.

The leather is made wet and then impressed. We use a vice or a drill press for smaller stamps.

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I am confused about making hot stamps from rubber stamps? How does this work and will it work for leather? One of my suppliers hot stamps his leather but he has a metal die hooked up to electricity to make it hot.

[Len Levi]

The leather is made wet and then impressed.

.


That's called "casing" the leather.

http://standingbears.wordpress.com/2006/06/30/casing-leather-for-tooling-leather-moisture-content/

Delrin works well for engraving the stamps.

[Steven Wallace]

Leather is very easy to mark permanently. Most leather workers will tell you that it is easy to mark a piece of leather with as much as your thumbnail. I have a couple of leather workers that I have made "makers marks" for. In those instances I have just taken some scrap 1/4" acrylic and reverse (very necessary task) image engraved on a 3/4" circle. I had to engrave it 3-4 times to get the depth I needed but they worked out fine.

[John Barton]

That's called "casing" the leather.

http://standingbears.wordpress.com/2006/06/30/casing-leather-for-tooling-leather-moisture-content/

Delrin works well for engraving the stamps.

Yes, I know that but the question was rather generic. Preparing the leather can be simple as wetting the leather slightly or doing a much more involved process commonly known as casing. Casing generally is taken to mean letting the leather soak in a prepared casing solution and then letting the leather dry back to a certain point before one begins carving.

We simply wet the surface a little bit and use the clicker press to make the impression.

Delrin rod works well for the stamps but the delrin sheets we got didn't work so well for the plates. This other material which I don't know the name of is harder than delrin and it lasers well for the plates. I think it's a linen based phenolic but as you can see I am not a materials engineer and since I bought it in a Chinese supply shop they don't even have the English name for the material. I just go there with a sample and ask for "this".

[John Barton]

Leather is very easy to mark permanently. Most leather workers will tell you that it is easy to mark a piece of leather with as much as your thumbnail. I have a couple of leather workers that I have made "makers marks" for. In those instances I have just taken some scrap 1/4" acrylic and reverse (very necessary task) image engraved on a 3/4" circle. I had to engrave it 3-4 times to get the depth I needed but they worked out fine.

Yep, that's it. There are a few laser engravers who are marketing to the leather working community.

For everyone else if you have a Tandy Leather or other leather working supply stores in your area it might be worthwhile to let them know you offer this service.

Surprisingly a lot of leather workers aren't really familiar with the versatility of a laser engraver as pertains to their business.

Another thing that you can make are what's called "tapoffs".

A tapoff is a pattern that is basically a line drawing that a leather worker puts on the wet leather and gently taps the outline into the leather. With this he then has a guide to begin the serious tooling to detail the piece. A tap off like the other stamps and embossing plates would be done in reverse.

These are great for leather workers who do the same patterns repeatedly. Traditionally they would take a paper pattern or tracing film and trace each line by hand using a stylus or a ballpoint pen. Obviously being able to tap it in reduces the amount of time and increases the accuracy of the patterns.

[John Barton]

I haven't tried this yet but it should be possible also to make embossing wheels out of delrin and phenolic rod for those of you with rotaries. I have a rotary on my Chinese lasers but we have never plugged it in.

On my ULS we use the rotary all the time to do pool cues and billiard balls and I love it.

In the cue factory near by they have three ULS lasers with rotaries and we have came up with some amazing 360 degree designs.

Anyway, I am rambling....

[Steven Wallace]

John great info, sounds like you have done leather work at sometime. I did some a long time ago in junior high shop class, circa 1967. The Tandy in your area can also let you know about Leather Worker Societies or Clubs in your local area. If they have a meeting, you may want to try and attend. Take a demo piece and or one of these maker's marks with you as well as contact info. Provide a sheet for them to sign in on, so later you can send a followup email / letter / phone call and check their interest. If they do a lot of repetitive work, tapouts are very well received and can be done on 1/8 inch acrylic. Remember you are engraving away material where they DO NOT want to see a mark.

[John Barton]

John great info, sounds like you have done leather work at sometime. I did some a long time ago in junior high shop class, circa 1967. The Tandy in your area can also let you know about Leather Worker Societies or Clubs in your local area. If they have a meeting, you may want to try and attend. Take a demo piece and or one of these maker's marks with you as well as contact info. Provide a sheet for them to sign in on, so later you can send a followup email / letter / phone call and check their interest. If they do a lot of repetitive work, tapouts are very well received and can be done on 1/8 inch acrylic. Remember you are engraving away material where they DO NOT want to see a mark.

Steven,

This is my website. www.jbcases.com We make leather cases from $400 to $2500

We use the laser to engrave directly on the leather, we use it to mark our leather directly instead of using tap-offs, we use the laser to do some complex designs that are then enhanced with hand tooling. We use the laser to cut standard parts and do custom parts.

In my custom-production shop we use the laser as above.

In our wholesale/retail shop where we sell all manner of billiard supplies we use the laser to offer engraving and custom fabrication services. We use the ULS 660 and it's paid for itself several times over.

I know people on here are always asking for ideas on what to do with the laser so I offered a few things that we use in the leather case business.

I forgot one more. Inlays.

Often people will have pool cues with inlays that they would like the case maker to duplicate. When I was doing custom engraving on people's pool cues I found that I could duplicate most inlays in a matter of minutes. So by doing this you can also offer a service to custom cut inlay pockets and parts to match.

I am sure that the demand for this will be very small but I can tell you that quite often the person asking for this type of case is the "money is no object" sort.

So there you go. Hope this brings some extra business to some of you laser heads!

[Andrea Weissenseel]

John, this sounds very interesting. I'm doing quiet a few rubber stamps and got into experimenting with embossing stamps for paper. I wasn't aware that delrin can be used for leather as well always thought that you got to have metal to mark leather. Did I understand that right you don't use a positive and negative ? Would be interesting to see your clicker press :) as I don't have any imagination what size of press one needs.

Thanks for sharing that idea, Andrea :)

[Rodne Gold]

You can actually use the laser to make metal dies if you want to go thru the hassle.
You need to mask the metal with a resist - we find that the shiny polyester based sign vinyl works well.
You laser away what you want "sunk in" and then have to find a way of clearing the engraved section of the residual glue left - sandblasting with the finest grit works. You then mask ALL areas you dont want eaten away , spray paint , nail varnish etc works well and is easy to remove.
You then dip the die in a mordant or etching compound , caustic soda for aluminium , ferric chloride for brass and steel ...or nitric acid....
Swish it around in the mordant till you have the depth of etch you want , then clean and strip the masking.
It's not quite as simple as it sounds , but it does work VERY well and you dont really need any fancy equipment.
If you dont have a blaster , you can spray on an etch primer and then an automotive paint as a resist and laser thru that , you still get a residue but using a very soft brush or your fingertips with a household soft abraisive cleaner like handy andy will clear it...
Paint is ok as a resist but small insides of letters etc tend to be undercut with deep etches and if you use hot etchant , the paint can lift.
You can buy ferric chloride at most stores like radio shack that sell PCB making kits...
Its not an acid per se , but will attack most metals including your nice stainless steel sink and will stain all your clothes orange. Be careful if using it on aluminium or magnesium as it can go exothermic and bubble and spit and go ballistic..dilute it with 3 parts water for ally or magnesium.
You can make quite a nice etchant tank out of a small fish tank , use the aquarium pump to bubble the mixture and the aquarium heater will take it to a temperature where the ferric will work quite quick (40 degrees C is ideal) - suspend the plate to be etched in it.
Often a feather is used to remove bubbles on the plate itself , if there are bubbles in the engraved section , the thing wont etch there

[John Barton]

John, this sounds very interesting. I'm doing quiet a few rubber stamps and got into experimenting with embossing stamps for paper. I wasn't aware that delrin can be used for leather as well always thought that you got to have metal to mark leather. Did I understand that right you don't use a positive and negative ? Would be interesting to see your clicker press :) as I don't have any imagination what size of press one needs.

Thanks for sharing that idea, Andrea :)

Here are a few pics of the press and a vice we use for small stamps. As well I have a few examples of stamps and plates.

Our press is a small hydraulic one that I inherited from a factory I work with. I have no idea on it's specs. At our place in N. Carolina we have a manual press that has a big crank wheel to torque it. Something like that would work just as well I think.

We only use the negative on these. If I wanted to do a reverse embossing then I could do one from the back of the leather and use a positive on the bottom to raise the leather in the front instead of depressing the outline.

The delrin and phenolic rod stamps work well with low volume use. I expect that if someone wants to use them for hundreds of impressions a day then they might wear out. I say "might" because I don't know yet. On the leather worker's forum one guy said he uses his plastic embossing plates in a production environment and they hold up well.

I could definitely see a sort of metal stamp shaft with a holder on the end where you might stick in a predefined sized wafer of delrin and when it wears out then it's simply replaced.

For our own purposes we just make them to do prototype designs for our wholesale customers so they get little repeat use. However we are about to do a run of 18 cases per model from the last batch of prototypes so we will get to see how the plastic (or phenolic) plates hold up as I am sure the factory would rather use those for this low quantity order if possible.

I have also included two pix of a product made using the embossing techniques. As I said the embossing plates for the decoration on the back and on the lower front pocket were done on the laser. The pirate flag on the top pocket was cut and engraved by the laser. The parts were all laser cut including the edges of the pockets.